Unfortunately, Nageli failed to perceive the importance of what Mendel had found. He suggested that Mendel try breeding hawkweed. Mendel obediently did as Nageli suggested, but quickly realized that hawkweed had none of the requisite features for studying heritability. It was evident to him that Nageli had not read the paper closely, or possibly at all. Frustrated, Mendel retired from investigating heritability and spent the rest of his life growing outstanding vegetables and studying bees, mice, and sunspots, among much else. Eventually he was made abbot.
不幸的是，耐格里没有意识到孟德尔的发现的重要性，他建议孟德尔培育山柳属科植物。孟德尔按照他所说的去做了，但很快发现山柳属植物并不具备研究遗传性所必不可缺的特点。很明显，耐格里并未认真阅读他的论文，甚至可能根本没有读。灰心丧气的孟德尔从此放弃了遗传性研究，在他的余生中转而种植良种蔬菜，从事蜜蜂、老鼠、太阳黑子之类别的研究。最后他被推选为修道院院长。
Mendel's findings weren't quite as widely ignored as is sometimes suggested. His study received a glowing entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica — then a more leading record of scientific thought than now — and was cited repeatedly in an important paper by the German Wilhelm Olbers Focke. Indeed, it was because Mendel's ideas never entirely sank below the waterline of scientific thought that they were so easily recovered when the world was ready for them.
孟德尔的发现并未像有时候被认为的完全被大家疏忽。他的研究成果被光荣地收入《大英百科全书》中——当时是一部记录科学思想的著作，其重要性远远超过它在今天的地位，并且在德国威廉·奥伯斯·福克所撰写的一篇重要论文里被一再引用。实际上，由于孟德尔的观点一直未曾沉没在科学思想的汪洋大海之中，因此。当世界具备了接受它们的条件时，它们就很容易地被人们重新发现。
Together, without realizing it, Darwin and Mendel laid the groundwork for all of life sciences in the twentieth century. Darwin saw that all living things are connected, that ultimately they "trace their ancestry to a single, common source," while Mendel's work provided the mechanism to explain how that could happen. The two men could easily have helped each other. Mendel owned a German edition of the Origin of Species, which he is known to have read, so he must have realized the applicability of his work to Darwin's, yet he appears to have made no effort to get in touch.
达尔文和孟德尔一起为20世纪的全部生命科学奠定了基础，不过他们两个都没有意识到这一点。达尔文发现所有的生物都是相互关联的，并且它们说到底都“源自一个共同的祖先”；而孟德尔的工作则从机制上为这一切是怎么发生的提供了解释。他们两个人本来可以相互帮助。孟德尔拥有一本德文版的《物种起源》，据说他读过这本书，因此他一定意识到他的工作适用于达尔文的理论，但是他似乎并没有想办法和达尔文联系过。
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